Friday, August 1, 2008

Mr. Kasoff has asked me to publish his response as prominently as my original post. And I am happy to do so. Here it is:

NICK KASOFF: Hi ... I’m Nick Kasoff, the webmaster of The Thug Report. Thanks for the nice write up. And kudos for your excellent research on my other activities. However, there are a few things that need correction here:

1. I am not, and have never been, affiliated with any of the websites you name here, nor do I contribute to them in any way.

2. It’s not hard to see that I have nothing to do with these sites - I do not, and have never, done anything anonymously on the internet. My domains are registered in my own name, and my blog posts are also done with my real name. Heck, I’m even listed in the phone book. Why would I do a bunch of anonymous blogs, then expose myself to heat by putting my name on The Thug Report? Anonymous domain registration is only twenty bucks a year, people ...

3. While we appreciate anyone who links to our site, that does not imply that we endorse their views. We receive traffic from all sorts of sites, from white supremacist to hip hop.

While you have obviously concluded the contrary, I actually like black people. I live in a racially diverse area, not because I can’t afford one of those all white enclaves in the ‘burbs, but because I prefer the urban environment. I find that the vast majority of black people are friendly, hard working, and just generally decent folks.

If you read the “About the Thug Report” page on the site, you’ll see my motive for doing this is NOT to defame black people, but to help, in my small way, to drive us toward a solution to urban crime. While I don’t have the solution, I feel that identifying the problem is the first step to finding it.

Our cities and inner ring suburbs are America’s future. They are the only place you can live without spending huge amounts of time and money driving. They are racially and economically diverse, have a housing stock of quality that today’s builder’s can’t match, and a sense of community that the gated neighborhoods of suburbia can never create. I am outraged that a tiny group of lawless people have succeeded in making large swaths of urban America uninhabitable. The Thug Report is my contribution toward reversing that trend.

I understand that many of you may disagree with the tactic. But at least now, you understand the motive is as far from racial animus as one can get.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Meet Nick Kasoff of Ferguson, Mo. (a suburb of St. Louis). He is a former radio talk show host and a home-computer consultant. He owns rental properties.

Mr. Kasoff is also politically active. He was a delegate to the Missouri Republican convention in May.

Kasoff supported Ron Paul, but now he’s backing John McCain. “At this point, I will do whatever I can to prevent socialist Barak Obama from being elected as President,” he wrote in a recent online comment.

Nick Kasoff spends a lot of time on the Internet. In January 2007, he launched a website called the Thug Report – a Drudge-style links list devoted to “urban crime news.”

Almost all of the criminals Mr. Kasoff showcases are black. And he uses ghetto dialect in some of his headlines. Such as:

“Cali bangaz recruit kids”

“Chicago killaz get teen girl”

“St. Louis shoota hits 1”

“Texas rappa gets 30 in slaying”

Occasionally, Kasoff will mock the names of black suspects by posting a snarky caption along with their mug shots. Example: “My name Santwoine. My name Raevon.”

I have no problem with any of that. There is a shitload of black violent crime in America. If Nick Kasoff wants to focus on that, he has a right to.

And if somebody else wants to launch a website devoted to white criminals or Hispanic criminals, that is their right.

At least Kasoff isn’t hiding his identity. He has posted comments on message boards as “Nick Kasoff – The Thug Report.”

Alas, I am convinced that Nick Kasoff is perpetrating much darker mischief.

In May 2007, I first blogged about an anonymous troublemaker masquerading as various members of a supposed black racist cult led by “Prophet Yacub 7 Ali.”

These so-called “Negro Sun Worshippers” – under numerous pseudonyms on numerous blogs – claimed the ability to inflict skin cancers on white people with just a look.

2. Black mug shots featured on Kasoff’s Thug Report also turn up on the anonymous hoax sites... like this one of rapper DMX:

3. The first wave of Yacub 7 Ali/Ghetto Bragging Rights sites appeared in February 2007... one month after Kasoff registered the Thug Report domain name.

4. Kasoff’s desire to “do whatever I can to prevent socialist Barak Obama from being elected” would explain the latest wrinkle in the Yacub 7 Ali mythology... something called the “God Damn America Movement.”

Monday, June 4, 2007

At the risk of boring some of you, I have to say I’m intrigued by Nicholas Stix, the Internet journalist who still… still!… believes “Yacub 7 Ali” and his cult of Negro Sun Worshippers actually exist.

Stix is the only quasi-legitimate writer to have spread the notion that there’s a group of blacks on the Web actually celebrating the vicious rape-murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom in Knoxville.

I may have discovered the reason why.

Blacks used to bully him as a kid.

Before I get into that, let me share some good news. The folks in charge at Blogcritics.org – a grassroots-media website that draws as many as 80,000 unique visitors in a day – removed a few paragraphs from Nick Stix’s May 29 article on the “Knoxville Horror.”

Stix originally wrote: “Some black supremacist activists have… publicly expressed their love for [the accused murderers].” He cited Internet comments posted by “one of the contributors to the black supremacist Web site, Svengali Media, which celebrates all black-on-white racist atrocities, and has cheered the rapes, tortures, and murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom…”

Here, now, is the “editor’s note” attached to Stix’s story:

“Some material in this article which discussed the site Svengali Media has been removed. It was not essential to the main points of the article and functioned as a distraction because of the questionable nature of the site and the material contained on it. …”

I had sent an email to Blogcritics publisher Eric Olsen and his political editors last Tuesday, explaining that Svengali Media is not a genuine black website. It labels itself, on one webpage, “cynical humor, more offensive than amusing.”

As Dave Nalle, a Blogcritics editor, wrote in a blog comment last Tuesday: “My first assumption when I saw the site was that it was a highly developed sarcastic parody of some sort…”

If Svengali Media seemed fishy to Dave Nalle, and seemed fishy to me, and seemed fishy to those on various Internet discussion boards where the hoaxster has trolled (such as this one)… why didn’t it seem fishy to Nicholas Stix?

In response to my email, Stix wrote to Eric Olsen that the Svengali Media site “has the distinct flavor of black supremacism, as I have known it… firsthand since childhood…”

Since childhood? What does that mean?

Nicholas Stix is in his late 40s. He grew up in Long Beach, N.Y. – a largely white town in Nassau County – in the same neighborhood Billy Crystal grew up in. So where did he learn of “black supremacism”? Perhaps the answer can be found in a piece Stix posted on August 22, 2001.

As a prelude to his discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Stix shared a recollection of his youth. A youth during which “almost every day meant a fight.”

Stix doesn’t say that his bullies were black. But now that he has made an issue of his childhood experience with “black supremacism,” we can assume they were.

If only Mr. Stix would write directly of the racial bullying he endured. Maybe we could all learn something from that. (I’m sure he’s not the only one who could tell such stories.)

What Nick Stix should quit doing is believing everything he reads on the intertubes. And spreading made-up horseshit about a “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition.”

So here’s what he wrote in 2001:

NICHOLAS STIX: “Arthur, you’re going to have to stop messing with my family,” I said, standing in Arthur Harris’ doorway. Arthur said, “Wait a second,” and went back inside his apartment. On a hunch, I went into in my apartment, a few doors down, and got my friend, “Hank Aaron.” I returned to Arthur’s doorway, where he and his friend, “Jim Bowie,” greeted us.

I didn’t tell Arthur that I was going to kill him if he tried to step across the threshold, but that’s just what I was going to do.

For thirty minutes at dinner time, we stood there. In silence. Arthur and “Jim,” and me and “Hank.”

I’d never seen such a big knife. Choke-a-horse big. And yet, after thirty minutes, Arthur agreed to call off his buddies. I then returned to our apartment, where for the next thirty minutes, every muscle in my body shook uncontrollably.

Now, I’m no Audie Murphy. I’ve always been pretty much of a coward; in combat situations, I’ve had to rely on keeping my wits. Most of the time, I’ve bluffed my way out; since I almost always had to fight much bigger, healthier opponents -- and as the last Jew in my Long Beach neighborhood, almost every day meant a fight -- I developed methods of scuffling and clutching much bigger boys to a draw.

In a poor neighborhood, if you’re a teenage boy with no man or big brother around, it’s incumbent on you to protect your mother. If necessary, you kill for her. Otherwise, your choice is to stay and die, or run and hide. (Not that my mother held that view; she was a good “liberal,” which almost got me killed on many an occasion. She has since been mugged out of the worst of her socialist excesses.)

But this Svengali Media/”Yacub 7 Ali” crap is getting out of hand. All thanks to one man: self-styled “dissident journalist” Nicholas Stix, whom I had never heard of until this month. He is now the Internet’s number-one dupe in service to the Yacub 7 Ali hoax.

Unable to recognize a twisted joke when he sees one, Nicholas Stix has reported as fact that svengalimedia.com is the product of “black supremacist activists.” He believes there’s a group of Negroes on the Web literally cheering and bragging on behalf of black criminals who rape and murder whites.

Even after I’ve made him aware of a Svengali webpage that says, in black and white, “svengalimedia: cynical humor, more offensive than amusing,” Nick Stix insists on taking it seriously.

In mid-May, he disseminated the hoaxster’s cruelest fabrication. Couching it as an “obscene” rumor spread among blacks, Stix wrote: “According to this fantasy, [Channon] Christian wanted to die from black sexual torture, and arranged everything herself.”

How could any intelligent person take at face value anything found on svengalimedia.com? Particularly that the site was created by black people?

Yep, according to Svengali Media, a black psychic has communicated with the ghost of rape-murder victim Channon Christian. The site describes Zelda Barrons X as the author of a book – “Life After Death for White Folks” – that is “cultishly popular among neo radical pro black groups.”

Of course, no such book can be found anywhere on the Web. And the only places you can read about the “famed” Zelda Barrons is on websites and blogs affiliated with the Yacub 7 Ali hoax… or else on legitimate discussion boards where the hoaxster goes a-trolling.

After I first blogged about this 13 days ago, the Svengali hoaxster put up a post headlined “SVENGALI MEDIA EXPOSED.” Momentarily abandoning the pretense of being a black hate group, the hoaxster offered a whole new cast of fictional characters – including site owner “Jeuger Niglery” and “Arthur Marshall, Web detective.”

Also this: “Niglery, whose photo has never been taken, is often called by associates who dare to speak his name aloud as a media vampire.”

All of which is just more prankish bullshit. This seems to be the whole point… sheer Discordian mischief. Lies wrapped in jokes wrapped in disinformation. You get it now, Nicholas? Cult leader Yacub 7 Ali doesn’t exist! Neither does the “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition”... which you reported as real.

Unfortunately, Nicholas Stix’s two articles this month advancing the Svengali Media hoax are now strewn all over the Internet. They’re on Stix’s four different personal websites. And one article or the other has been published by right-wing sites such as David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks, Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, Intellectual Conservative, WEBCommentary, The Conservative Voice and Global Politician.

Worst of all, one of Stix’s articles was published Tuesday at Blogcritics.org, a huge grassroots-media site that logs between 1.2 million and 2 million unique visitors per month.

(Did I say this crap is getting out of hand?)

I sent an email to the publisher of Blogcritics, Eric Olsen. Then Nicholas Stix responded with an email of his own – which he subsequently posted on the Intellectual Conservative blog.

Here are both emails (though I’ve trimmed Stix’s for length... and it’s still way too goddamn long):

DAVID MILLS to Eric Olsen (05/29/07):

Greetings, Mr. Olsen.

I'm David Mills, a former reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Now I blog as Undercover Black Man.

An adjunct to this hoax is a supposed cult of "Negro Sun Worshippers" led by "Prophet Yacub 7 Ali," who have the power to inflict skin cancers on white people with just a look. I wonder if Nicholas Stix believes that's real too?

You can track this hoaxster's digital footprints via domaintools. All the websites associated with the svengalimedia/Yacub 7 Ali hoax are registered through the same IP address.

Svengalimedia.com was created last November 27; americanpatriate was created on January 9; yacub7ali.org was created on January 27.

The only places on the Web where you'll read about the "Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition" (which Stix believes exists) is on these websites... or on any of the pseudonymous blogs created over the same span of time to drive traffic to these websites.

Apparently somebody's up to some Discordian mischief, Eric. He has duped Nicholas Stix, and now a racial lie is being spread on your website.

David has a hunch. A hunch is not proof, and a hunch is not journalism, but the place where journalism begins. When Mills initially wrote to me, I began an involved response, but cut it short when I realized that I was going to miss a deadline on his behalf, and wrote a short reply, which I posted together with his assertion:

That the site (Svengali Media: http://www.svengalimedia.com/race/sexiest_black_male_felon_2006.html) is produced by nutjobs has no bearing on whether it’s a hoax. Black supremacists ARE nutjobs. (Very dangerous, violent nutjobs, I might add.) That the writers largely use obvious pseudonyms likewise has no bearing on whether it’s a hoax. I did some of my best journalism using pseudonyms, I know brilliant journalists who use them, and I heartily recommend their use to freelancers and whistleblowers who want to tell the truth and keep their day jobs. (Actually, quite a few people think I am presently using a pseudonym. Years ago, my wife concluded that newspaper editors who rejected all of my submissions didn’t believe my name was real; when I sent them stuff under a more normal-sounding pseudonym, they immediately bought it. Nick Stix is a better name for a comic than a journalist.)

Obviously, these guys are not doing this, in order to tell the truth.

Initially, David Mills strongly insinuated that a white supremacist was singlehandedly producing the site and its satellites. I responded that if it’s a hoax, it’s one of the most brilliant ones I’ve ever seen. It has the distinct flavor of black supremacism, as I have known it both firsthand since childhood, and through studying its “literature” since 1990. Black supremacists celebrate any act of violence against whites (and Asians, too, but they tend to be less obsessed with them), the more gruesome, the better. Interestingly, if it is a hoax, it is the first I know of in which whites imitated black supremacists; all the others I’ve found involved blacks imitating white supremacists.

But again, this is just David’s hunch.

Personally, I have never come across a white supremacist with this sort of literary talent. The Svengali sites have several different writers or at least authorial names, writing in several different styles and levels of literacy. If you check out sites like vnnforum or stormfront, you will find people of decidedly limited capacity.

The Blogger Who Cried Wolf

But in a later post, David denied ever having said a white supremacist was behind the “hoax.” So, what does he really believe?

He has charted the person or persons behind this phenomenon moving from site to site, and put up some whois information. I intended to check it out, but on my schedule, not his. (I’ve got real commissions to complete; he appears to be between scripting gigs and at loose ends. Besides, David comes across to me as The Blogger Who Cried Wolf. He has a history of shouting that so-and-so is this-and-that (e.g., “racist,” in the case of Lawrence Auster, whose freelancing gig at Front Page Mag he sneakily got killed, when Mills sent a poison pen letter last year to David Horowitz, and the latter lost his nerve), and other people have a history of jumping at his charges. Just look at all the people who apparently swallowed his “hoax” hunch whole. I’m not jumping.

Having mirror sites is not evidence of a hoax. Hell, I have multiple blogs and Web sites; I do it so that more people will read my work. At present, there are roughly 6,499,900,000 people I’m not yet reaching.

Even if the person behind the site jumped ISPs, it wouldn’t prove anything; people probably periodically alert his providers that his site is what it is, and the providers shut him down for violating their guidelines. The same thing likely leads to his (or their) material being removed from newspaper message boards.

Someone who claims to be named “Larry Collins” posted a comment to David’s blog, claiming that Svengali is the work of his brother, “Steven,” that the brothers are white, and that all of the names associated with Svengali are the creations of “Steven Collins.”

There are three problems with “Larry Collins’” assertion. First, among the fake names “Larry Collins” lists is mine. Am I a creation of “Steven Collins”? Not that I know of. But maybe I’m lying. Or maybe, being “Collins’” creation, I’m unaware of my true identity. Secondly, a later post to the same thread with the same linked signature (“lc,” for “Larry Collins”), sounds like it was written by someone else altogether. Thirdly, I followed the “Larry Collins” link to his blogger page, and from there to his blog, “The Truth About On Svengali Media and Jou” ( http://svengali-truth.blogspot.com/ ), where he is supposed to be exposing this media “hoax,” and found … nothing. There’s no there there.

If anything, “Larry Collins” and his “blog” are the hoaxes.

That leaves us with … nothing.

And so, I am not going to get flustered and put on the defensive by The Blogger Who Cried Wolf. If I have some spare time, I’ll try and check out the whois information, but I am not going to waste my time on David Mills. If it’s a hoax, let him talk straight (no more ‘It’s a white supremacist/It’s not a white supremacist’), and hunt down the offender. Until then, he’s just spreading hysteria.

I won’t be devoting my life to identifying whoever’s behind the “Yacub 7 Ali”/Svengali Media race hoax. But I’m sure glad I posted what I did nine days ago. (Even though the hoaxster, predictably, was thrilled by the attention.)

Now, whenever this fucknuts shows up in an Internet discussion group, trying to stir some shit, people can do a little Googling and find out it’s all bogus.

On Friday, “Shakespeare Johnson” – one of the hoaxster’s many pseudonyms – posted an article on the college-oriented chat board ProgressiveU.org. Headline: “YACUB 7 ALI SUN WORSHIPPER SETS WHITE WOMAN ON FIRE ON CITY BUS.”

One reader took the bait, calling the supposed Negro Sun Worshippers a “hate group.”

Shakespeare Johnson shot back: “Racist hate is a white people invention. Black reactionary hate is not vile and corrupted. … Black reactionary hate groups are righteous and ‘clean’, good and uncorrupted hatred.”

Sure enough, the gullible commenter responded: “Your group is still a bunch on religious zealots who are wacked in my opinion.”

Then, yesterday, a commenter known as “say_no_to_racists” posted this: “This person is a white supremacist troll. Quit feeding him.” And he linked to my post.

(Alas, say_no_to_racists didn’t heed his own advice. Today, he’s been wasting his time swapping posts with Shakespeare Johnson on ProgressiveU.)

Also last Friday, the hoaxster – using the name “Mirabeau Johnson” this time – got on the message boards of a Beaumont, Texas, TV station, KFDM.com. He started a thread called “Sun worshipers set innocent woman on fire on city bus.” He linked to an article about Yacub 7 Ali on one of his own hoax websites (americanpatriate.com).

Within hours, a KFDM.com reader busted him and linked to my post.

By the way, I never said this hoaxster has a white-supremacist agenda. Probably he’s just into mischief-making for the sick fun of it.

Which is not to say he’s harmless. On April 15, “Jacque Patrick Fitzgerald” (same asshole) posted an article on NowPublic.com, a “participatory journalism” site. It says: “ST. NICOLAS THIEF & KNOXVILLE BLACKS PLAN… SOCIAL ACTION PROTEST PARTY TO CELEBRATE UNDERPRIVILEGED BLACKS WHO VICTIMIZE PRIVILEGED WHITES.”

This piece logged 30,000 views before a NowPublic editor tagged it as “fishy” last Wednesday. “It has been alleged that this story is a hoax,” the editor wrote, with a link to my post.

The NowPublic article, to remind you, was picked up and reported as fact by Nicholas Stix, an Internet gadfly and self-styled “dissident journalist” who has written much about the Knoxville murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

I sent Stix an email after my first Yacub 7 Ali post. Stix wasn’t persuaded that this “protest party” in support of black murderers is a sham. “If it’s a race hoax,” he replied, “it’s one of the most brilliant ones I’ve ever seen.”

That’s giving the hoaxster waaay too much credit. Although a white-power agitator known as “kickdrum,” who is active on YouTube, was also suckered. Embedded below is kickdrum’s May 1 video, in which he speaks of svengalimedia.com – the hub of the hoax – as if it were a genuine black racist website.

I would point kickdrum and Nicholas Stix to this webpage, where the hoaxster himself labels Svengali Media “cynical humor, more offensive than amusing.”

UPDATE (05/30/07): How much damage can one gullible yet hardheaded sap do? I guess we’ll have to wait and find out.

Internet gadfly Nicholas Stix is the closest thing to a journalist to have reported as fact the ludicrous Svengali Media/Yacub 7 Ali hoax. And he is single-handedly responsible for this hoax gaining a bit of traction on the Internet – particularly the notion that there’s a “black supremacist” group out there celebrating the vicious murders of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, a white couple, by a group of blacks in Knoxville, Tenn.

Stix wrote two articles this month describing svengalimedia.com as an authentic black website. One or the other of those articles has been posted on four of Stix’s own websites, and on at least six other opinion sites (including Blogcritics yesterday and Global Politician today).

These articles have also been reproduced (or linked to) by at least 10 other bloggers, as well as… wait for it… David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks site.

I’ve been swapping comments with Nicholas Stix on the Blogcritics site. But he continues to say there’s nothing fishy about Svengali Media, or the “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition,” or even Yacub 7 Ali and his cult of “Negro Sun Worshippers.” “[T]he sites certainly are in character with black supremacy,” wrote Mr. Stix.

Amazing.

Meanwhile, I’ve found yet another of the hoaxster’s Internet outposts. He started a Facebook group (with only one member). It’s called “theSvengaliMedia Fan Club.” It says: “SvengaliMedia is quickly becoming known as the crack cocaine of the internet... highly addictive and outlawed.”

Does that sound like a black man who spends his time celebrating criminal violence against whites and studying the mystical secrets of inflicting skin cancers with his eyeballs?

Or does it sound like a damn troll, trying to pump up the Svengali Media meme and have some fun?

An elaborate racial hoax has been simmering on the Web for several months. It involves “Prophet Yacub 7 Ali,” a supposed black cult leader who teaches his followers to inflict skin cancers on white people… with just a look.

Wait, don’t laugh. There’s a much uglier underside to this hoax.

These so-called “Negro Sun Worshippers,” the bogus “journalists” writing about them, and the Internet posters calling attention to them have been appearing in online forums wherever brutal, real-life black-on-white crimes are being discussed.

The posters – masquerading as black men, and using various pseudonyms – celebrate black violence against whites. They point readers to a website promoting the “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights Competition.”

In one case, they’re spreading a grotesque lie about a white female murder victim. (Basically saying she asked for it, out of extreme sexual masochism.)

It all seems calculated to stir up anger amongst white folks.

Sure enough, some gullible whites are swallowing it.

The hoaxsters have inserted themselves most visibly into online discussions of the “Knoxville atrocity” – the rape, torture and murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom last January, for which five black suspects have been charged.

Yesterday, the American Renaissance website – run by a highly educated, media-saavy white nationalist named Jared Taylor – got suckered.

American Renaissance offers a daily list of weblinks on topics such as non-white immigration, non-white crime, affirmative action and political correctness. Usually AmRen links to mainstream media outlets – Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, etc.

Not so with this story on Thursday: “Knox Blacks Celebrate Carjacking Rapists in ‘Party.’ ”

For this one, American Renaissance links to NowPublic.com – a so-called “participatory journalism site” where anybody can post anything. No oversight whatsoever.

Here’s what the story says:

“St. Nicolas Thief, president and founder of Black Poverty Speaks, along with many local Knoxville blacks… has organized a social action protest celebration championing Lemaricus Davidson and Letalvis Cobbins” – two of the accused slayers of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.

“ ‘We’re coordinating the celebration to to jive with the march angry whites are planning in memory of the victims…,’ Thief, who is currently stationed in Knoxville, said.

(“St. Nicolas Thief” is one of the dubious monikers that pops up on websites and blogs associated with “Yacub 7 Ali.”)

Here’s how AmRen readers reacted to this “news” article:

“Outrageous. They are ‘celebrating’ a horrendous crime that defies description. This is the black mindset, we must be aware of how these people think to protect ourselves.”

“Interesting insight into the mentality of Blacks. This is very much an accurate portrayal of how most of them think.”

“I am actually sick to my stomach. … The fate that these two individuals met is unimaginable. Now, a story of a celebration for this garbage is just too much.”

“What can one expect? Blacks openly celebrated O.J.’s acquittal. … This nonsense is reason # 10 million why the races should never have been together.”

“Though our leftist press won’t report it, one hopes that blacks will have their ‘party’ and many others like it. They’ll dispel a great many multicultural myths by doing so. When liberal suburbanites learn that ‘white privilege’ entitles blacks to rape, sodomize, and murder them, they might just become white nationalists.”

The hoaxsters got what they wanted. Which was not, apparently, to make white readers such as these look foolish. But to make their blood boil.

By this morning, however, a few AmRen posters smelled something fishy. One wrote: “This is obviously a hoax. Look at the names. St. Nicolas Thief?”

Another poster apparently Googled the byline on the NowPublic.com article (“Jacque-Patrick Fitzgerald”) and found a May 9 story titled “Black Sun Worshippers Claim Responsibility for Greensburg Tornado.”

That piece quotes Yacub 7 Ali’s “spokesman,” Lucifer Nigaros, as giving thanks for the recent devastating twister in Kansas: “They are a wicked and vile people who live there and our prayers continue to be that God avenge us for the devastation whites caused the underprivileged in New Orleans.”

The enterprising AmRen poster concluded that “perhaps his extremely sick story about the [Knoxville] celebration should be taken with a pinch of salt.”

Who is behind this hoax? And why are they (or perhaps just a “he”) spending so much time and energy pretending to be black people who hate white people?

I don’t know. But I have been observing their mischief for weeks.

On January 11, a “Rice Whitman” posted this on the Jewish Defense League’s blog: “I am very disturbed with a new trend occuring in the New England states in the South East. Whites are being placed under curfew by blacks who maintain the ability to reradiate ultraviolet light and cause skin cancer. …

“Please focus attention on, a ‘Prophet’ Negroes are calling Yacub 7 Ali and his New Negro Movement. Do a Google search. … Thanks.”

A variation on the theme appeared on February 12, when “Parker Whittman” posted this on his LiveJournal blog: “Good and descent citizens of Savannah are walking amongst a new evil man and a new evil group of people. Evil is Evil! I will be the first man in this community to state aloud I have developed skin cancer and believe it to be a result of the radical blacks of this new negro sun worship sect. …”

All of these blogs debuted in February or April except for the “Waldorf Carathers” blog, which popped up last December. Back then, it was focused on a different black-on-white crime – the “Savannah Debutante Murder.” (Three black men were convicted of killing Jennifer Ross during a robbery the night of her debutante ball.)

All of these blogs deal with nothing else but the Yacub 7 Ali cult or a celebration of black-on-white violent crimes.

And, of course, there’s no mention of the existence of a “Yacub 7 Ali” anywhere on the World Wide Web except for this interlocking network of blogs, websites and discussion-board trolls.

Until a few days ago, the key websites of the Yacub 7 Ali hoax were www.svengalimedia.com, www.americanpatriate.com and www.yacub7ali.org. Those homepages are now inaccessible. (But here is a page from a Google cache.)